<p>Surprising what a difference a can make, innit?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Yesterday I was down and out, today I'm not on top of the world, but I'm better than halfway up.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>What's changed? Very little. I got a couple of crits out of the way, had a natter with my union man about getting back to work <em>(as a devout workaholic, I also hold down a full time job, but I haven't been able to work after a cardiac wobble at the beginning of the year)</em>. I made some inroads on a non-fiction book, <em>How To Write Horror </em>and I took the evening off to watch an episode of the Beeb's "Sherlock" which I'd recorded when the series ran a few weeks ago.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It's an interesting experiment and oddly enough, I think it works. I'm a purist at heart. I have a full set of Conan-Doyle's original tales, and normally I would consider a 21st century Holmes to be blasphemy of the highest order, but the program is put together well, with tight dialogue and fast-moving action sequences, without losing Conan-Doyle's fine attention to detail and deductive logic. The timing is right, too. The original Watson returned to England after being wounded in the Anglo-Afghan war. This doctor Watson has returned to England after being wounded in the current Afghanistan campaign.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It's rare that I watch TV. In fact if the TV people relied on me for their viewing figures and income, they'd have shut down years ago <em>(hurrah!)</em> The very thought of watching television is enough to have me ranting at the rafters. And yet I watched a couple of hours of telly last night. No wonder the sun's shining this morning.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The holliers are getting closer too. A fortnight Friday I shall climb on back of giant albatross <em>(Traffic, Hole In My Shoe 1967)</em> and fly a couple of thousand miles south for a fortnight in balmier climes <em>(Me, this blog, 2010.)</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The packing is almost done. All we really have to do is balance the two cases and two pieces of hand luggage to ensure we come within the 40kg (joint) limit. It means juggling camera lenses here, netbooks there, sunscreen in one bag, shampoo in another, mp3 player in my pocket, mobile phone in the wife's handbag. It's organised chaos but we always get there.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It reminds me of my writing process. I always set up individual folders for each project. Having a scout round the hard drive yesterday, I noticed that Voices, one novel 110,000 words long, files 334kb, has numerous folders and an all up size of 34mb. Everything is in there, from the earliest draft to the final version. And that doesn't count the audio version running to 2.5 gigabytes.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And hopefully by the time I get back from Tenerife, on October 1st, that single file will be on the countdown to launch on an unsuspecting reading public.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>One side-effect of this unexpected optimism is a reduction in my pain levels. It's probably psychological. There is no magic cure for my crumbling frame, so it's unlikely to have simply "gone away" but for the moment it appears to be sleeping.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Ah, the joys of looking forward.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>If you want to save wear and tear on your eyes reading, this, you can listen to it <a href="http://audioboo.fm/boos/174861-up-ish"><strong><span style="font-size: small;">here</span></strong></a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

<p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--></p> <p>Overheard in a bar: "Women? Only good for one thing and even then they spend more time working out whether the ceiling needs repainting."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>One man amongst four talking to his mates, and all four laughed.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Overheard in another bar: "Men? Obsessed with one thing and even then most of 'em are no good at it."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>One woman talking to several of her mates, all female, all laughing.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Question: if they both work for Sky TV and they're both overheard making the same remarks live on telly, which of them do you fire? The man, the woman, both ... or neither?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The answer should be neither, but it's more probably the man.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Why?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Any number of reasons spring to mind, the most likely of which is any TV station wants a bit of leg showing in front of the cameras. Now how's that for sexist?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>As football pundits go, my first choice wouldn't be Andy Gray or Richard keys, but credit where it's due, they fronted the Premier League for Sky since it began in 1992, and to create such a storm over off air remarks, the same sort of remarks that can be heard over and over again whenever and wherever any clique of men or women get together, is not only outrageous, it's a matter of grave concern.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The broadsheets said "time to call time on this bar room rhetoric." What utter twaddle.</p> <p>Read my blog posts. How many times will you pick up such nuances in references to Her Indoors or the "blonde who lives over the street"? Do you take them seriously? Of course not (or if you do you need to get your sense of humour recalibrated.)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So why should this furore worry us?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Censorship.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>How long before the publishers are saying to their authors, "cut that line. It's sexist"? If you think this is pie in the sky, it's not. It's already happening. The latest edition of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" made an attempt to eliminate the word "nigger." Dambusters' leader, Guy Gibson, owned a black Labrador named "Nigger". The dog's name was changed in later edits to "Blackie."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Taking out this racially offensive word does much for the misguided cause of political correctness, but it does nothing for racism other than try to bury it.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The remarks from Keys and Gray were not sexist; they were bar room banter, and to make an effort to stamp out this kind of drivel, whether male or female, is to infringe upon our freedom of thought and speech. It's an Orwellian nightmare far worse than anything ever found in Communist Russia, far worse than anything Orwell ever dreamt of.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I read one argument that says Sian Massey was withdrawn from her next game and as a result lost money. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know whether referees are paid by the match or salaried. Pulling her out of that game was the right decision because the focus has to be on the match, not the officials. Replays of the Wolves-Liverpool game, by the way, showed that Ms Massey got the disputed decision dead right: Keys and Gray got it wrong ... and that doesn't surprise me in the slightest.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So who should have paid for the incident? I don't know that anyone should have. An apology from Sky would have been the order of the day, and maybe disciplining the prat who left the microphone switched on.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The idiotic remarks have provided cynics like me with a wonderful opportunity, as my current Facebook status testifies. "We've just rehomed a 3-year-old Jack Russell. The kennel maid said he was oversexed and needed neutering. We're thinking of calling him Andy Gray."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I didn't see the match. I dropped Sky when the price rocketed. My reaction would have been simple. It's time someone explained the offside rule to Keys and Gray. Now, with all the furore, I think it's time the offside rule was redefined to include all those politically correct nurks and nerds who try to tell us how we should think and speak.</p>

<p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--></p> <p>For anyone who may fancy a free read<em> (yes I mean totally free, gratis, for nothing, without charge)</em> I'm running short stories on my main blog, starring the world's newest 3rd age sleuth, Joe Murray, proprietor of the Lazy Luncheonette, Chairman of The Sanford Third Age Club.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Obviously it's a publicity exercise designed to get the word out about the STAC Investigates series of novels/novellas, but there are no strings attached to the free reads. Each tale runs to 1,000-3,000 words but I break them down into bitesized chunks of 1,000 words (or thereabouts) at a time. This means that to read a 3,000 word tale you have to come back three weeks on the trot, or wait until week three and then read the full monty at one hit.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The STAC Investigations are cosy crimes. There's no gore, no buckets of blood or sadistic killers, just a puzzle for the Sanford Sleuth. The first tale is already up and running, with parts 1 &amp; 2 in place, Part 3 to follow over the coming weekend.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Entitled <em>The Tanzanite Manoeuvre</em>, you can find part 1 <strong><a href="http://dawr.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/the-tamzanite-manoeuvre-part-1/">here</a></strong></p> <p><strong>&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Comments are appreciated, and if you feel the urge to tweet it or share it on Facebook, please carry on.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Enjoy!</p>

<p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotOptimizeForBrowser /> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">On our visit to Mablethorpe Seal Sanctuary, I took a video of seals recuperating in a small pool. You'll find it posted on videos. <br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->&nbsp;<!--[endif]--></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">I think the seals were malingering. Free food and plenty of TLC, who wouldn&rsquo;t.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->&nbsp;<!--[endif]--></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">More seriously, I was surprised to learn that the sanctuary doesn&rsquo;t just cater for seals, but all kinds of wildlife, with many of the animals injured when they are brought in.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->&nbsp;<!--[endif]--></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->Those creatures fit enough are released back into the wild as soon as is practicable, the rest get a buckshee holiday for life and pass their time staring at humans the other side of the cage bars, trying to work out why those idiots want to be free when you can have everything you want for nothing, as long as you agree to live in a cage.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

<p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--></p> <p>It's "Read an e-book week" over at Smashwords, and for the time being, you can read all of my published titles there, FREE. Yes, free, gratis, for nothing, and not just a 20% sample download, the full burn.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I'm a Yorkshireman and we're not known for our generosity. To me every sixpence is valuable. So have I suddenly lost whatever sense I had?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And here's another poser for you. Why has this blog been dormant so long?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The two questions are inextricably linked.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Coming up to the New Year I was working on a series of novels under the umbrella title Old Nick &amp; The Countess. Halfway through Book 1 it occurred to me that they were wrong. The theme and format were not working and I had no wish to carry on with them... at least for the time being.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I gave the matter some considerable thought while working on the 100 Stores for Queensland project and eventually I came up with a different idea. Once again, it went through a number of theoretical incarnations before I finally got it right(ish) and the Stasis Center books were born.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Writers are strange creatures and none is stranger than me. Book 1, working title The Dead Web, was already written and stored on the hard drive. Simple enough job to pull it out, reorganise it, and knock it into shape. That took up a good part of January/February and it was only when I'd finished it that I realised it wasn't Book 1 but Book 2. I needed another title to lay the foundation. I spent most of February writing that, again drawing from older material.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I won't go into the premise of Stasis Center here. There's a link to the web page further down. To summarise, they're time-travelling, zombie filled, sci-fi/horror tales with a single, central enemy and a couple of goodies chasing him. They're not specifically YA, but they can be read by anyone from the age of about 13 upwards.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>My original plan was for short, sharp action-packed reads, and the first title, Coldmoor, is exactly that. Less than 45,000 words long, it is all action, choc full of zombies, ghosts, evil doers, good guys trying to sort it out, served with a soupcon of suspicion. It's already been described as a cracking little read and the price is unbelievably cheap: $1.14 (it should have been 99cents but we Europeans have to fork out 15% VAT on the cover price.)</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>With Book 1 safely uploaded and beginning to sell, I turned my attention back to what had become book 2: The Dead Web.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>By this time, I'd been reading up on successful e-novels and I learned that the longer works actually do better. This was a surprise to both me and my editor, the incredibly accurate and reasonably tolerant Maureen Vincent-Northam. We're both fans of print, and we thought that short, punchy reads would do better on e-readers. Not so, say the big sellers, and their sales figures back them up.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The result is that The Dead Web, which is coming close to completion, has expanded from its original 40,000 words, to 60,000. None of the action has been sacrificed. In fact, it's been added to. Characterisation has been strengthened and there is more background material.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Book 2 will be followed by Book 3 as is the tendency. Little work has been done on Book 3 (working title Layla's Moon) but it should be with you by the late spring.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>For now, if you're a sci-fi/horror reader, click the link below where you can learn more about Stasis Center, the theme, the novels, and then follow the links to Smashwords where you can pick up Coldmoor and get a taste of what is to come. And if you do that before the end of the week, you can get it for FREE.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Stasis Center web page is <a href="http://www.dwrob.com/SC1.html">here</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Stasis Center also has its own Facebook page, where you can keep up to date with events and forthcoming titles. When you visit the page, click "like" and updates will post to your Facebook wall. You can find the page <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stasis-Center/180413602003578">here</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Stasis Center novels are not the only titles you can get for free over at Smashwords. My latest major novel, Voices can be found on my Smashwords page, and that's free for the coming week (normal price $3.99) and so, too, can my Spookies mystery, The Man In Black (usually on sale at $2.99).</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>All the titles can be found by following my page at Smashwords <a href="http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/dwrob">here</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>When purchasing the books, don't worry that the system is telling you the price. There's a coupon code in the top corner of each book's page. Just look for the "sitewide promotion" link.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Enjoy!</p>

<p>I came across a free e-book. I won't name it or the author because I've no particular desire the plug the thing and no wish to embarrass the writer, but in the first four pages I found the following errors.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Whitechapel was spelled <em>white chapel</em>. And this was on the publicity page!</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>"<em>I bet it has flees</em>". A character talking about old clothing. Did the writer mean fleas?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>We next meet a <em>work scared</em> barman. He was terrified of work, or are we supposed to translate it as work-scarred?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Talking about a pub, one of the men says, "The <em>White Swans</em> not far ..." How do we interpret that? The White Swans are not far, or the White Swan's not far?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Another character was described as <em>anemic</em> instead of anaemic, after which one of the men said his pal was about to "<em>complement</em> your friend." He was going to add to her rather than compliment her.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>I couldn't read further than those four pages, and it occurred to me that this books is overpriced at free. I did some research on the writer which led me to a website run by a small bunch of writers who "came together <em>collectivly</em> to self-publish ..."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>That's not a typo. It's exactly how the "about" page describes the site.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>There are any number of possible reasons for these problems.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The writer could be lazy. The writer may not have proofed the M/S properly before putting it online as a finished work. The writer could have uploaded an earlier version by mistake and not realised it yet. The writer could also be ignorant of basic spelling and grammar, which means what? He/she should not be writing? Of course not, but he/she should be looking to improve the basic skills.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>To those who say, "you're just being over-picky," let me pose a question. Would you ask a plumber to repair your car, or a gardener to install your central heating? Then why ask someone who has no conception of written English to entertain you with fiction?</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The book in question raises several issues related to self-publishing.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Novels take long time to perfect, and even then we don't always get it right. I can write a full-length novel in a month. That's 100,000+ words. The final draft, however, usually takes between one and two years. Before it goes to any publisher, before I even consider self-publishing, I have it read by another writer or editor and I take their feedback seriously. Where I disagree with it, I will try another reader or two and take a consensus opinion. But unless they are blatantly wrong <em>(which doesn't happen often)</em> I never argue about errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The piece in question, which is over 40,000 words long, has obviously never been read by a professional writer or editor. Even the prose of the blurb on the e-book site is questionable.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>This kind of poorly written fiction inevitably tars the self-publishing industry with a brush that is not justified.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Times are tough for writers. It's near impossible to break in with the mainstream houses. Your work needs to be of the highest calibre and it needs to drop into the submission editor's lap at the right time. If, like me, you turn out average pulp fiction, your chances are nil. If you can't find an independent willing to take the risk, you're faced with self-publishing or not at all. I've been lucky. I've found independent houses willing to take my work, but even so I've published a couple of titles off my own back and I now there are other members who have, too.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>And there are many fine self-published volumes out there, but what chance do they have if the reader drops onto poor examples like the one above?&nbsp; One look at it and the potential buyers says, "Forget it. I'll check out the biggies."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>So what brought on this particular diatribe? I've just self-published a full-length e-novel, and it's priced at ...<strong> FREE</strong>.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><em><strong>The Man In Black</strong></em> is not a classic. It's a Spookies mystery <em>(for those who remember The Haunting of Melmerby Manor)</em> a supernatural thriller with a little humour here and there. Despite the price, there is no skimping. It runs to about 90,000 words and it's available for download in a variety of formats from the following url: <a href="http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27623">http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27623</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>It's destined to become a marketing tool, but for now, there are no strings attached. There may be errors in it. If so, they won't be in the first four pages, and there won't be quite so many as those in the above example.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Enjoy, and if you're so minded, please email brickbats and bouquets to <a href="mailto:fans@dwrob.com">fans@dwrob.com</a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p>